One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ( 1975 ) R | A criminal pleads insanity after getting into trouble again and once in the mental institution rebels against the oppressive nurse and rallies up the scared patients. Director: From $2.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC a list of 26 titles created 30 Sep 2012 a list of 34 titles created 28 Dec 2012 a list of 25 titles created 20 Jan 2013 a list of 22 titles created 17 Oct 2013 a list of 44 titles created 3 months ago Title: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) 8.7/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below.

You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Won 5 Oscars. Another 30 wins & 13 nominations. See more awards » Videos A young F.B.I. cadet must confide in an incarcerated and manipulative killer to receive his help on catching another serial killer who skins his victims. Director: Jonathan Demme A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where an evil and spiritual presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from the past and of the future. Director: Stanley Kubrick The lives of two mob hit men, a boxer, a gangster's wife, and a pair of diner bandits intertwine in four tales of violence and redemption. Director: Quentin Tarantino Henry Hill and his friends work their way up through the mob hierarchy. Director: Martin Scorsese Forrest Gump, while not intelligent, has accidentally been present at many historic moments, but his true love, Jenny Curran, eludes him. Director: Robert Zemeckis The aging patriarch of an organized crime dynasty transfers control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant son.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola Two detectives, a rookie and a veteran, hunt a serial killer who uses the seven deadly sins as his modus operandi. Director: David Fincher An insomniac office worker, looking for a way to change his life, crosses paths with a devil-may-care soap maker, forming an underground fight club that evolves into something much, much more. Director: David Fincher In German-occupied Poland during World War II, Oskar Schindler gradually becomes concerned for his Jewish workforce after witnessing their persecution by the Nazi Germans. Director: Steven Spielberg A sexually frustrated suburban father has a mid-life crisis after becoming infatuated with his daughter's best friend. Director: Sam Mendes Mathilda, a 12-year-old girl, is reluctantly taken in by Léon, a professional assassin, after her family is murdered. Léon and Mathilda form an unusual relationship, as she becomes his protégée and learns the assassin's trade. Director: Luc Besson The early life and career of Vito Corleone in 1920s New York is portrayed while his son, Michael, expands and tightens his grip on the family crime syndicate.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola Edit Storyline McMurphy has a criminal past and has once again gotten himself into trouble and is sentenced by the court. To escape labor duties in prison, McMurphy pleads insanity and is sent to a ward for the mentally unstable. Once here, McMurphy both endures and stands witness to the abuse and degradation of the oppressive Nurse Ratched, who gains superiority and power through the flaws of the other inmates. McMurphy and the other inmates band together to make a rebellious stance against the atrocious Nurse. Written by Jacob Oberfrank If he's crazy, what does that make you? Genres: 19 November 1975 (USA) See more » Also Known As: Atrapado sin salida See more » Filming Locations: Did You Know? Trivia In 1993, the movie was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

See more » Goofs After McMurphy hijacks the bus and is driving through town, there are some 1970s automobiles, including a Plymouth Duster and Chevy Nova, and a store with lots of color TVs in the window. The movie is set in 1963, according to the World Series broadcast. See more » Quotes See more » Crazy Credits The cast is credited in alphabetical order in the end credits, except for Brad Dourif , who is listed last as follows: "and introducing / Brad Dourif as Billy Bibbit". See more » Connections (Philadelphia, PA) – See all my reviews The opening shot of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST is a bleak glance at an Oregon morning. Stirring, haunting music plays gracefully on the soundtrack and a car approaches. Inside the car is one of film history's most remarkable characters. "Randle McMurphy" is about to bring hope, humor, and a glimmer of reality to some disturbed people in a mental hospital. Jack Nicholson as "McMurphy", is something of a paradox. Is this guy crazy or is he really the lazy, conniving criminal most believe him to be?

That is the magical mystery and start to a journey into mental illness and the effect this man will have on some truly messed up men. Milos Forman directs this all-time classic, which swept the Oscars deservedly, and holds up so well 25 years later. It is a simplistic film about small people living in their own small worlds. Manic moments are mixed with poignant acting all leading to an astounding climax. Not before or since CUCKOO'S NEST has a collection of different characters had such an impact on me. You could write a book report about each of the patients in the ward. The two most important people here are, of course, Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher. Nicholson has his greatest moments in this picture. One brilliant scene has him doing an imaginary play-by-play commentary of the 1963 World Series to the group, who are not allowed to watch the game on TV. It is a poetic sequence and Nicholson goes crazy with his delivery, describing baseball with colorful anecdotes and profanity. "McMurphy" immediately makes an impression on the crazies and shows them how they don't have to stick to the "normal routine".

He knows their names right away, he sprays them with water, he makes impossible bets with them, he introduces them to fishing, and he even gets a suffering young kid (played well by Brad Dourif) a "date". Louise Fletcher plays one of the more reprehensible human beings in film as "Nurse Mildred Ratched". She is a hardened woman, one who makes the daily meetings with the group a contest to see who will win. Her stubbornness and lack of compassion for the poor guys is rather one dimensional. That's perfect because that is exactly who she is. Her strong will to keep things monotonous leads to a final showdown with the free spirited "McMurphy" in what is easily one of the most shocking and disturbing climaxes in recent memory. ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST does not try to make a statement about mental illness or how the unstable should be treated. Rather, it is a very simple portrait of the long days and hilarious scenarios that can come about when a mixed bag of suffering people are thrown together. Mental illness is nothing to laugh about, but the fact that Nicholson is not really crazy (at least in my opinion) allows us to be amused.

He seems to love his compadres in the hospital. He is mislead, however, into thinking he can do as he pleases. There is no denying the power of CUCKOO'S NEST. The two main powerhouse performances are golden, the cinematography is morbid and gritty like it should be, the "Chief" is great as Nicholson's right hand, ah, protagonist, and you care a lot about what will happen as the film moves on. The famous, final shot ironically happens to be an exit of a major character into that bleak, Oregon morning. NOTE: I have never read the book and I find it hard to believe author Ken Kesey has never watched the filmed version. Comparing a book to a movie is impossible. They are 2 distinctly different artistic methods of story-telling. 288 of 348 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) Pages: ( 1 ) ( 2 ) Background One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) is one of the greatest American films of all time - a $4.4 million dollar effort directed by Czech Milos Forman. Its allegorical theme is set in the world of an authentic mental hospital (Oregon State Hospital in Salem, Oregon), a place of rebellion exhibited by a energetic, flamboyant, wise-guy anti-hero against the Establishment, institutional authority and status-quo attitudes (personified by the patients' supervisory nurse). [Forman himself noted that the asylum was a metaphor for the Soviet Union (embodied as Nurse Ratched) and the desire to escape.] Expressing his basic human rights and impulses, the protagonist protests against heavy-handed rules about watching the World Series, and illegally stages both a fishing trip and a drinking party in the ward - leading to his own paralyzing lobotomy.

Jack Nicholson's acting persona as the heroic rebel McMurphy, who lives free or dies (through an act of mercy killing), had earlier been set with his performances in Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970) . The mid-70s baby-boomers' counter-culture was ripe for a film dramatizing rebellion and insubordination against oppressive bureaucracy and an insistence upon rights, self-expression, and freedom. The role of the sexually-repressed, domineering Nurse Ratched was turned down by five actresses - Anne Bancroft, Colleen Dewhurst, Geraldine Page, Ellen Burstyn, and Angela Lansbury - until Louise Fletcher accepted casting (in her debut film) only a week before filming began. And actor James Caan was also originally offered the lead role of McMurphy, and Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman were considered as well. The entire film was shot in sequence, except for the fishing scene (shot last). It surprised everyone by becoming enormously profitable - the seventh-highest-grossing film ever (at its time), bringing in almost $300 million worldwide.

The independently-produced film also swept the Oscars: it was the first film to take all the major awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress) since Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934) . It was nominated for nine Academy Awards in total: Best Actor (Jack Nicholson with his first win after losing the previous year for Chinatown (1974) ), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Bill Butler and Haskell Wexler), Best Director, Best Editing, Best Picture, Best Score (Jack Nitzsche) and Best Supporting Actor (Brad Dourif). "Cuckoo's Nest" beat out tough competition for Best Picture by Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and Altman's Nashville (1975) . The film's unauthorized screenplay (by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman) was restructured and adapted from author Ken Kesey's 1962 popular, best-selling novel of the same name so that it would appeal to contemporary audiences.

[Kesey wrote the first version of the film's screenplay.] The film's title was derived from a familiar, tongue-twisting Mother's Goose children's folk song (or nursery rhyme) called Vintery, Mintery, Cutery, Corn. The ones that fly east and west are diametrically opposed to each other and represent the two combatants in the film. The one that flies over the cuckoo's nest [the mental hospital filled with "cuckoo" patients] is the giant, 'deaf-mute' Chief: Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn, And one flew west, And one flew over the cuckoo's nest. The novel was originally dramatized on Broadway (an adapted play by Dale Wasserman) beginning in 1963 with actor Kirk Douglas starring in the lead role as McMurphy and Gene Wilder as stuttering Billy Bibbit. Kirk Douglas bought the rights to the novel, but couldn't convince film studios to produce the film. Many years after its short theatrical run, Douglas transferred the rights to his son, actor/producer Michael Douglas, who co-produced the United Artists film with Saul Zaentz.

Michael Douglas had considered playing the starring role, but by the time of the film's production, he judged himself too old. Kesey had derived most of the novel's secondary characters from real-life psychiatric ward patients at a VA hospital (in Menlo Park, CA) where he had once worked in a night job in the late 50s. (In the novel, McMurphy was a stocky redhead with a poorly-stitched gash across his cheekbone and nose. And 6' 8" tall, 'mute' native American Chief Bromden, a paranoid schizophrenic, narrated the story and was the central character in the novel, providing hallucinatory images of an all-powerful, all-seeing bureaucratic 'harvesting machine' designed to foster complete social integration - a Combine, that would squelch all individuality and create a compliant society (both within the hospital and in the wider society). Those who were non-conforming would be relegated to a correctional facility for repair or removal.

Kesey was so incensed by the change in the perspective of the story-telling (away from Chief Bromden's first-person perspective) and other changes in the script that he sued the producers.) The Story The film's credits play under an Oregonian wilderness scene at dawn, as a car's headlights move across the screen. A black-coated supervisory nurse, Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) (known as Big Nurse in the novel) arrives at the locked, security ward of a state mental hospital [on location in Salem, Oregon at the Oregon State Hospital/Asylum], where patient inmates, nurses, and orderlies attend to early morning medications. Pills are dispensed from the Nurses' Station, a large booth with sliding glass panels. An energetic, swaggering, wisecracking, non-conformist, rebellious patient/prisoner Randle Patrick (R.

P.) "Mac" McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), 38 years old, is escorted into the ward where he meets some of the bizarre, memorable patients/inmates (most of whom are voluntarily committed): a silent, dignified, huge and towering Indian giant "Chief" Bromden, aka "Broom" (Creek Indian Will Sampson in his film debut) - a "deaf and dumb Indian" "as big as a god-damn tree trunk" - with a father blinded after many years of alcoholism a pathetic, incessantly stuttering, paranoid boychild, thirty-year old Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif in his film debut) - shy, virginal, impressionable, and deathly afraid of his mother an ineffectual, rationalizing intellectual Dale Harding (William Redfield) - relatively sane but unable to get over his wife's betrayal and adultery when she "seeks attention elsewhere" an insecure neurotic Charlie Cheswick (Sydney Lassick) lacking self-confidence a short, smiling Martini (Danny De Vito in one of his earliest roles) with an immature personality a cynical, trouble-making sadist Taber (Christopher Lloyd in his film debut) Dr.

Spivey (real hospital superintendent Dr. Dean Brooks), the head doctor at the institution, explains to McMurphy why he has been admitted from a prison work farm - reciting various labels applied to him: Dr. Spivey: It said you've been belligerent, talked when unauthorized, been resentful in attitude toward work in general, that you're lazy... McMurphy: Chewin' gum in class, ha, ha...? Dr. Spivey: Well, the real reason that you've been sent over here is because they wanted you to be evaluated...to determine whether or not you are mentally ill. This is the real reason. With his logical mind and a bent against bureaucratic illogic, McMurphy offers his own assessment: "Well, as near as I can figure out, it's 'cause I, uh, fight and f--k too much." The doctor reminds McMurphy of his five arrests for assault, to which McMurphy replies: "Five fights, huh?

Rocky Marciano's got forty and he's a millionaire." The crime of statutory rape put him into jail: But Doc, she was fifteen years old, going on thirty-five, Doc, and, uh, she told me she was eighteen and she was, uh, very willing, you know what I mean...I practically had to take to sewin' my pants shut. But, uh between you and me, uh, she might have been fifteen, but when you get that little red beaver right up there in front of ya, I don't think it's crazy at all now and I don't think you do either...No man alive could resist that, and that's why I got into jail to begin with. And now they're telling me I'm crazy over here because I don't sit there like a goddamn vegetable. Don't make a bit of sense to me. If that's what's bein' crazy is, then I'm senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, wacko. But no more, no less, that's it. The prison officials think he's been "fakin' it," pretending to be insane to get himself transferred out of the hard work details of the prison work farm.

McMurphy actually admits that he is sane: "I'm a god-damn marvel of modern science." But he agrees to cooperate during a period of evaluation, study, and treatment of his condition: I'm here to cooperate with ya a hundred percent. A hundred percent. I'll be just right down the line with ya, you watch. 'Cause I think we ought to get to the bottom of R. P. McMurphy. McMurphy is assigned to a ward supervised by a consistent, bureaucratic authoritarian named Nurse Mildred Ratched and soon senses he must battle her, antagonized by her emasculating, slightly sadistic, and domineering attitude in a chaotic group therapy session. The scene ends with her powerful, yet placid and internalized, self-satisfied smile. With controlled but manic lunacy, the new misfit patient brings life to the dead atmosphere of the mental institution in a number of scenes, winning a number of rounds over his arch-enemy. While the non-restricted patients board a field trip bus during a restorative outdoor exercise period, he teaches those left behind, including the Chief, an "old Indian game" - basketball, in a fenced-in court.

"It's called, uh, put the ball in the hole." On the shoulders of Bancini (Josip Elic), a Frankenstein-like inmate, he demonstrates how to dunk the ball in the hoop. With a cool, emotionally controlled look, Nurse Ratched views his antics from the ward's window. With card-shark skill, he introduces card games (with pornographically illustrated cards) and black jack gambling (betting cigarettes) to the dull monotonous routine of the inmates. First with subtle mind games, he rebels against correct behavior and the rules of the hospital laid down by the self-righteous and cooly-controlled Nurse, unwilling to yield to her power over his life-affirming spirit and cunning manhood. McMurphy violates one of the cardinal rules by entering the Nurse's Station to turn down the loud volume on the piped-in music. When told he is forbidden, he again makes his request outside the station, but she refuses: "That music is for everyone, Mr.

McMurphy." He calmly asks the assistant Nurse Pilbow (Mimi Sarkisian) about the ingredients of his "horse-pill" medications during one of the compulsory lineups for pill delivery: But I don't like the idea of taking something if I don't know what it is...(joking) I don't want anyone to try and slip me salt-peter. You know what I mean? For his resistance and questioning of the rules, he is accused by those in power of being upset: "Don't get upset, Mr. McMurphy." When the Nurse offers an alternative method to taking pills orally, McMurphy decides to take his pill (but then in a symbolic, antagonistic gesture doesn't swallow it.) The patients are organized and controlled through a rigid set of authoritarian rules and regulations that McMurphy questions: "God Almighty, she's got you guys comin' or goin'.

What do you think she is, some kind of a champ or somethin'?" The contest of wills with the Nurse is played out as a struggle to win the other inmates over to his way of thinking and behaving by establishing a political majority, to lead various group insurrections, and to emphasize how they have been denied their freedom of will: I bet in one week, I can put a bug so far up her ass, she don't know whether to s--t or wind her wristwatch. In the next group therapy meeting, McMurphy begs Nurse Ratched to rearrange the "carefully worked out schedule" of the work detail so that the inmates can watch the opener of the 1963 World Series baseball game (at Yankee Stadium) on television, adding: "a little change never hurt huh? A little variety?" To intimidate his liberating challenge to the leadership of the ward and to cause no disruption to the ward's precise schedule, she refuses: "Some men on the ward take a long, long time to get used to the schedule.

Change it now and they might find it very disturbing." The Nurse proposes a vote to decide the matter - "let majority rule" - already knowing that authority and power are on her side against the slavish, malleable, drugged-out patients. Only three votes support McMurphy's request and he can't believe it, envoking a political comparison: "What is this crap?...What is the matter with you guys? Come on! Be good Americans." When a Monopoly game between the inmates in the tub room leads to a heated argument, McMurphy sprays the inmates with water to cool them down, and then tells Harding, one of those which didn't vote for his request for a rearrangement of the schedule: ...stay all wet Harding, huh, cause I'm goin' downtown and watch the World Series anyway. Anybody want to come with me? Again, con-man McMurphy bets the patients that he can escape incarceration by lifting and smashing his way out of the ward with a heavy, marble-sided watering station. He plans to go downtown with Cheswick and "sit down at a bar, wet our whistles and watch the ballgame. And that's the bet! Now does anybody want any of it?

Huh?" Harding, contemptuously nicknamed "Hard-on" by McMurphy, gambles $25 that McMurphy isn't strong enough. McMurphy moves Billy out of the way before attempting to do the lift: Get out of my way son, you're usin' my oxygen. In a dramatic, riveting, and memorable scene, McMurphy strains and struggles valiantly to pick up the tremendous weight, gritting his teeth - but he cannot lift it. As he strides from the room, he turns toward the patients, refusing to acknowledge defeat, maintaining by his example that it is better to try and fail than to meekly accept an unsatisfactory status quo: But I tried, didn't I? God-damn it. At least I did that. During the next therapy session, Nurse Ratched determinedly presses Billy with questions about emotional disturbances resulting from a domineering mother. Hiding beneath her own cool demeanor are many neurotic, sexually-repressed feelings. By controlling the patients, she zealously serves her own ego needs rather than the therapeutic needs of the patients. Cheswick proposes another vote about watching the second game of the World Series, thinking it would be a better therapeutic alternative.

McMurphy encourages his usually compliant and spiritless fellow patients: I wanna see the hands. Come on. Which one of you nuts has got the guts? Nine votes are counted in the therapy group and McMurphy senses victory in this round over her. But Nurse Ratched refuses to have the other inmates won over to him and becomes the spoiler. She changes the rules to defeat the proposal: Nurse: There are eighteen patients on this ward, Mr. McMurphy. And you have to have a majority to change ward policy. So you gentlemen can put your hands down now. McMurphy: (turning and gesturing toward other men out of hearing range on the ward floor) You're tryin' to tell me that you're gonna count these, these poor son-of-a-bitches, they don't know what we're talkin' about. Nurse: Well, I have to disagree with you, Mr. McMurphy. These men are members of the ward just as you are. Nurse Ratched adjourns the meeting and closes the voting session as McMurphy struggles and fails to get the severely-disturbed patients to join in the vote.

When the Chief slowly raises his hand, McMurphy is elated, but the steely-willed Nurse rejects the vote of 10 to 8 from behind the glass panel of the Nurse's Station, and forbids them to watch television. She claims that the vote when the meeting adjourned was 9 to 9: McMurphy: The Chief voted. Now, will you please turn on the television set? Nurse: (she opens the glass panel) Mr. McMurphy, the meeting was adjourned and the vote was closed. McMurphy: But the vote was 10 to 8. The Chief, he's got his hand up! Look! Nurse: No, Mr. McMurphy. When the meeting was adjourned, the vote was 9 to 9. McMurphy: (exasperated) Aw come on, you're not gonna say that now. You're not gonna say that now. You're gonna pull that hen-house s--t now when the vote...the Chief just voted - it was 10 to 9. Now I want that television set turned on, right now.

(The Nurse slides the glass panel across the front of the Nurse's Station, shutting out his protest.) In the most well-remembered sequence in the film, McMurphy subversively pretends to be enjoying the second World Series baseball game on television in a contest of wills with the Nurse. He inventively re-creates the play-by-play excitement of the game. His excitement proves infectious - the other patients join him and look up at the dark television screen that reflects their faces - they almost believe that the game is real. In another evaluation session with Dr. Spivey after a four-week stay, McMurphy responds to a question about whether he likes it at the hospital. McMurphy explains how he has been antagonized by an emasculating, domineering female Nurse: McMurphy: Well, that f--kin' Nurse, man...She, uh, she ain't honest. Dr. Spivey: Aw now, look. Miss Ratched's one of the finest nurses we've got in this institution. McMurphy: Ha! Well I don't wanna break up the meeting or nothin', but she's somethin' of a c--t, ain't she, Doc? Dr.

Spivey: How do you mean that? McMurphy: She likes a rigged game, you know what I mean? The doctor offers his diagnosis of McMurphy's mental health state: "I don't see any evidence of mental illness at all. And I think that you've been trying to put us on all this time." To prove a point about the fine line between normality and abnormality, McMurphy demonstrates some stereotypical "crazy" behaviors and then asks: "Is that crazy enough for you? You want me to take a s--t on the floor?" Nurse Ratched - The 50 Best Villains in Movie History | Complex The 50 Best Villains in Movie History Played By: Louise Fletcher Movie: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) Mildred Ratched's title says "nurse," sure, but she's more of a tyrant than a candy-striper.

In director Milos Forman's excellent adaptation of Ken Kesey's already superb 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Nurse Ratched (played with stone-cold malevolence by Louise Fletcher) gets off on emotionally terrorizing the misfit patients living in her psychiatric ward. She's sick with power, knowing full well that the mentally impaired crazies under her control are helpless against her tactics. Initiated by rebellious newcomer Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), the patients have a fun night of debauchery, with alcohol and a couple of McMurphy's female friends. Ratched, having caught them red-handed, pinpoints the stuttering Billy (Brad Dourif) for her wrath: She tells Billy that his mother will find out about what he did, touching a heartbreaking and fear-inducing nerve. And she knows it. Shortly after, Billy commits suicide. And Ratched couldn't care less.

— MB WatchNow What's the Big Deal?: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) - MTV mtv Eric Snider 03/07/2011 The praise: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of only three films ever to win the "big five" Academy Awards: best picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay. (It Happened One Night [1934] and The Silence of the Lambs [1991] are the other two.) Cuckoo's Nest was also nominated for supporting actor (Brad Dourif), cinematography, editing, and musical score. The film won the big five categories at the Golden Globes (plus another one for Dourif), and six BAFTA Awards, including best film. It ranked 20th on the American Film Institute's 1998 list of the best movies ever made, and 33rd on the 2007 revised list. The context: When the movie version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest premiered, only 13 years had passed since the publication of the Ken Kesey novel on which it was based.

But those years were 1962-1975, a tumultuous period of assassinations, riots, wars, and protests that led to unprecedented changes in the American landscape. Cuckoo's Nest was about the counter-culture, about facing off against the Establishment -- and the Establishment of 1975 was considerably different from the one Kesey had been bucking against. A.D. Murphy's very positive film review in Variety addressed this issue: The past 15 years have covered what seems to be a century of enlightenment. Kesey, a major intellectual catalyst of the Beatnik era, is virtually an elder statesman of the avant-garde; he and others were stirring up the mind when less aware kids were doing their American Graffiti numbers. What used to be theatre-of-the-absurd has become -- via and after JFK, the Beatles, Vietnam, youthful rebellion, Watergate, etc. -- almost conventional, cliche storytelling.... Sadly, the ideas herein are today as earth-shattering as The Pill, as revolutionary as pot, as relevant as the Cold War. Gladly, however, their transfer to the screen is potent, contemporary, compelling.

Pauline Kael, writing for the New Yorker, also noted how things had changed since Kesey's novel was published, and approved of the way the film dealt with this shift: The book was a lyric jag, and it became a nonconformists' bible. Published in 1962, it contained the prophetic essence of the whole Vietnam period of revolutionary politics going psychedelic. Milos Forman, who directed the movie version, must have understood how crude the poetic-paranoid vision of the book would look on the screen after the 60s paranoia had lost its nightmarish buoyancy, and he ... did an intelligent job of loosening Kesey's schematism. But there were several negative reviews, too, by critics who didn't feel the movie had properly handled its source material. In the novel, the story is narrated by "Chief," the giant mute Indian confined to the same mental hospital as the protagonist, McMurphy. The movie shifts to a more objective point of view and loses some of the book's symbolism and ambiguity.

Time magazine's critic, Richard Schickel, disliked it because of these deviations: The movie version of Cuckoo's Nest is faithful to the external events of the novel -- no complaints there. The trouble is that it betrays no awareness that the events are subject to multiple interpretations. Jack Nicholson plays McMurphy as an unambiguously charming figure.... He is a fine fellow to spend a couple of hours with, but he has no depth or resonance, and his fate leaves us curiously untouched. Similarly, the zany behavior of his fellows is amusing, but the depth of their need for McMurphy is not even suggested. Finally, there is the problem of Big Nurse, the chief authority symbol in McMurphy's little world and his main antagonist. In the book, a good deal of the tension between them is oddly sexual. In the film, Big Nurse (Louise Fletcher) is merely a prim, quite sexless nag and a symbol only of niggling institutionalism. So nothing of any dramatic power gets going between her and McMurphy.

In the New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote: I suspect that we are meant to make connections between Randle's confrontation with the oppressive Nurse Ratched and the political turmoil in this country in the 1960's. The connection doesn't work. All it does is conveniently distract us from questioning the accuracy of the film's picture of life in a mental institution where shock treatments are dispensed like aspirins and lobotomies are prescribed as if the mind's frontal lobes were troublesome wisdom teeth. Even granting the artist his license, America is much too big and various to be satisfactorily reduced to the dimensions of one mental ward in a movie like this. Roger Ebert, giving the film three stars, also faulted its over-simplification: It's a lot easier to make noble points about fighting the establishment, about refusing to surrender yourself to the system, than it is to closely observe the ways real people behave when they're placed in an environment like a mental institution. But 28 years later, when he put the film on his "Great Movies" lists, Ebert wrote: The movie's simplistic approach to mental illness is not really a fault of the movie, because it has no interest in being about insanity.

It is about a free spirit in a closed system. And that helps us understand why the film is acclaimed today, perhaps even more so than it was when it was released. The novel had used the mental institution as a metaphor for the rules of society while still addressing the actualities of such an institution. The novel, to some extent, really WAS about mental illness. (Kesey had worked in mental wards and been a medication test subject himself.) The movie makes it all metaphor. The hospital only represents the Establishment, and does not try to be realistic. In 1975, the disconnect between the book and the movie was jarring to some observers, especially those who had read the novel when it was new. From a 21st-century vantage point, though, 1962 and 1975 aren't that far apart. We readily accept Cuckoo's Nest as a metaphor for anti-Establishmentism and aren't disappointed by its failure to show us what life is really like in a mental institution. Kesey's novel, a bestseller, was turned into a Broadway play in 1963, with Kirk Douglas in the lead role.

Douglas wanted to make a film of it, too, but couldn't get the project going. He eventually handed the film rights over to his son, Michael, who got the movie made in 1975 and served as its producer. By this time, Kirk Douglas was too old to play McMurphy, and Michael Douglas wasn't a well-established film actor yet, so the part went to Jack Nicholson. Jack was a 1970s phenomenon, with four Oscar nominations (but no wins) under his belt already. The film was a huge box-office hit. Its $109 million domestic haul (which would be $430 million at today's ticket prices) was enough to make it one of the 10 highest-grossing movies of all time up to that point. The movie: Randle P. McMurphy (Nicholson), doing time for statutory rape, is transferred to a mental hospital, though it's likely he was faking insanity to get out of work detail. Here he encounters a handful of genuinely insane people and tries to get them to question authority the way he does. Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher, who won the Oscar for her performance) will have none of this.

What it influenced: Nurse Ratched became a legendary antagonist, ranking 5th on the American Film Institute's list of greatest movie villains. (Only Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates, Darth Vader, and the Wicked Witch of the West ranked higher.) The name "Nurse Ratched" can be employed as shorthand for a cruel, humorless woman in authority; Tom Hanks referred to a nurse that way in Philadelphia, and so have countless sitcom characters. Will Sampson, who plays the giant Indian, later appeared in Poltergeist II: The Other Side, in which Craig T. Nelson wonders if Sampson's character might have escaped from an asylum, a winking reference to Cuckoo's Nest. The Czech filmmaker Milos Forman, who won an Oscar for directing Cuckoo's Nest, won another one for Amadeus (1984) and was nominated for The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996). He also made Hair (1979), Ragtime (1981), Man on the Moon (1999), and Goya's Ghosts (2006).

You can see a recurring theme in all of these films: eccentric, non-conformist characters who butt heads with the mainstream. What to look for: Yep, that's a young, less bald Danny DeVito as one of the patients, and Christopher Lloyd -- DeVito's future Taxi co-star -- as another one. Why didn't Jack Nicholson ever do a cameo on Taxi? That is a question you should consider. Brad Dourif was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing the virginal, stammering Billy. (On Broadway, that role had been played by Gene Wilder!) It was his first major film appearance, and it set the stage for much of his future career, which had him playing crazy and/or disturbed people in movies and TV shows. A notable exception was his Emmy-nominated turn as the doctor on HBO's Deadwood. Nurse Ratched is the first character we meet, and her introduction is subtle. Orderlies say "Good morning, Miss Ratched," and she politely returns the greeting. There is no hint that she will emerge as the film's villain -- except insofar as we expect anyone representing law and order to be the villain. Randle P.

McMurphy is very obviously the hero, and he's introduced as a figure of chaos who has barged into this tightly controlled world. What's the big deal: With everything that had happened to America since the book's publication, the idea of being skeptical of the Powers That Be was highly resonant with audiences in 1975. Since then, the film has come to represent much of what the '70s were all about at the movies: questioning authority, rebelling against the norm, refusing to be bound by traditional rules. (Fittingly, the movie was independently financed and produced before United Artists bought it.) Jack Nicholson, who had already played counter-culture figures in iconic films like Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, was the perfect choice to play McMurphy, and it cemented his status as a Hollywood icon. Further reading: The contemporary reviews are fascinating, though filled with spoilers. (I guess they figured everyone had read the book.) Here are reviews from Pauline Kael , Roger Ebert (and his 2003 re-evaluation ), Vincent Canby , Richard Schickel , and A.D. Murphy . * * * * Eric D.

Snider ( website ) is not interested in escaping by throwing a water fountain through the window, thank you. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest film review excellent = 4 stars; good = 3 stars; fair = 2 stars, poor = 1 star Artistic rating Milos Forman's 1975 adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which won five major Oscars, shows just how much subversive brilliance and serious misogyny can inhabit the same film. Released the year after President Nixon resigned, it captures the anti-authoritarian spirit of the Sixties counterculture, but seems to suggest that the revolution had little to offer its sisters. The film has since become a classic, with its timeless themes, dark wit, and excellent performances, especially by Oscar winners Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher. Today, Fletcher's portrayal of the insidious Nurse Ratched stands as a nursing image whose negative power may never be surpassed.

Randle McMurphy (Nicholson) is a charismatic roughneck who engineers a transfer from the work farm where he has been serving his latest sentence for assault to a state mental health facility, despite concerns that he is faking illness in order to do his time in a more comfortable place. McMurphy joins a unit of men with various psychiatric problems, including the mute American Indian Chief Bromden (Will Sampson) and the fearful young Billy (Brad Dourif). The unit is dominated by Nurse Mildred Ratched. Ratched leads the patients in daily discussions which at first seem like actual group therapy, and she offers calm, rational explanations for the array of rules with which she controls their lives. But McMurphy gradually realizes that Ratched is in fact a cunning sociopath who terrifies and psychologically tortures those she is ostensibly helping, aided by the meek Nurse Pilbow (Mimi Sarkisian) and a crew of thuggish and/or irresponsible African-American attendants (the movie is no friend of African-Americans either). Ratched's therapy is, to say the least, non-therapeutic. Yet the film emphasizes that--as in a company or a democracy--most of the patients are there voluntarily.

While the absentee male physicians debate whether McMurphy is really ill, he sets out to undermine Ratched's authority, leading the patients on forbidden adventures involving wine, women and song that he knows will infuriate Ratched. McMurphy is not exactly a diligent chaperone, but miraculously no serious harm results, and these escapades clearly promote more healing than Ratched's rigid, joyless regime. As McMurphy's refusal to conform starts to instill a sense of independence in the other patients, he and Ratched become locked in an escalating battle for the unit, and Ratched resorts to increasingly harsh measures to maintain control. Nurse Ratched has become an American archetype, a soul killer who masterfully abuses her professional and institutional power over her patients. Even her name evokes words like "rat" and "wretched." And the film offers no positive counterexample or explanation for her behavior (e.g., burnout after years of caring for difficult patients in a harsh state facility). Beyond the obvious political and social symbolism, Ratched could be viewed as a warning about the potential for abuse in the nursing profession.

But she can't easily be separated from the film's reactionary view of women generally: they are either emasculating, anti-sex mother figures like her, spineless mice like Nurse Pilbow, or--in the best case scenario--easy, giggling facilitators like McMurphy's girlfriend (Marya Small) whose name is Candy (really). The movie is a withering indictment of establishment power structures, but it seems to place the blame mostly on Mom, who just won't let boys be boys. While Mom's status as a nurse is probably incidental, the presence of such a destructive nursing image at the core of this important film is distressing. Reviewed by Harry Jacobs Summers Nursing Editor: Sandy Summers, RN, MSN, MPH Reviewed January 10, 2003 The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the Board Members or Advisory Panel of The Truth About Nursing. 'Cuckoo's Nest' actress says her Nurse Ratched character is too cruel for her to watch anymore | Fox News 'Cuckoo's Nest' actress says her Nurse Ratched character is too cruel for her to watch anymore Published October 04, 2012 Previous Next SALEM, Ore.

– Louise Fletcher says she can't bear to watch "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" because the Nurse Ratched character she won an Oscar for is so cruel. "I find it too painful," said Fletcher, 78. "It comes with age. I can't watch movies that are inhumane." Fletcher is returning this weekend to the institution where the movie was made in 1975, the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, the Statesman Journal reported ( ). The hospital, long under fire for inadequate programs and crumbling facilities, has been rebuilt in recent years. Fletcher is attending the opening of its Museum of Mental Health. The movie is based on the novel by Oregon writer Ken Kesey. It centers on the struggle between the steely Nurse Ratched and Jack Nicholson's scheming character, Randall McMurphy, who eventually gets a lobotomy for leading a rebellion among the prisoners on his ward. "I was really shocked in those scenes where I was actually so cruel," Fletcher said. In 1975, Dr. Dean Brooks, then the superintendent, opened the campus to the cast and crew. Fletcher said she was in the city 11 weeks, filming six days a week.

He and Fletcher have stayed in touch — they talk by phone each July 22, their common birthday. Brooks recalls the actress as being nothing like the character: "I have found her to be angelic." Fletcher, whose parents are deaf, took time out from filming to visit students at the Oregon School for the Deaf, he said. He said he's admired how she doted on her parents and cared for them as they aged, and how she dropped everything to spend time with a dying friend in London. Fletcher said better known actresses turned down the role, and it wasn't until she saw the film for the first time with an audience, in Chicago, that she was convinced she pulled it off. In scene where McMurphy throws Nurse Ratched against the wall and chokes her in a fit of rage, she said, "they all stood up and cheered in the theater and were stomping their feet. That got to me. I realized, 'Hey, I created a real villain here.'"

Question: Who played Nurse Mildred Ratched in the 1975 film ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’?
Answer: LOUISE FLETCHER